Short story about a ladybird beetle

I was on the train on my way to Eindhoven when I suddenly felt a crawling sensation on my left hand while I was sitting and starring at the landscapes of Netherlands through the train window. I looked at my hand and I saw a tiny ladybird beetle. It was probably a baby, for it only had two black spots on the wings (one on each) and looked smaller than normal size ladybirds.

Letting it crawl on my fingers I was thinking how in the world did this thing got on the train and how would it get out. I looked at all windows around me, but I couldn’t find a single one which could be opened.

Feeling the tiny feet tickling my skin I was musing of how my hands must feel from the perception of a ladybird. My skin certainly feels different than the surface of a tree, a leaf or a petal, a world which was way more familiar to the ladybird….

While all these thoughts were going through my mind, the tiny beetle started crawling on the large train window. It was crawling all the way up and then being unable to find its way out it flew down and started crawling up again… It repeated the same thing several times… I saw that the movements of the poor thing were getting slower with each attempt. It must have been frustrating to see the familiar world outside, yet being unable to break free and get there.

My mind made an allusion to a human life… How often do we try to crawl up, yet, being unable to find what we are looking for up there we fall down. Yet we keep on trying and trying, again and again. Trying to achieve a goal, trying to reach to the stars, trying to live, trying to survive…

How often do we have a feeling of being behind a glass, being passive observers of the world outside, being unable to take actions and being not free to make decisions? How do we feel when we simply cannot break the window and find our way out?

Observing the ladybird, I was thinking that this little bug was breaking all kind of conventions. Getting somewhere where it did not belong. Getting into the realm of human beings, on the train, where instead of flowers, leaves and petals, there is metal, leather and plastic. How foreign it must have felt for a tiny creature like that to be there… Yet, how adventurous it has been for a small beetle like this to travel hundreds kilometers away from its home and its familiar place…

I felt sorry that I couldn’t set the bug free. In order to pass to the main door on that train, it was necessary to pass at least through one door which would open automatically if a human being would approach, but the door would remain shut should the ladybird appear standing in front of it. Its size would have been too insignificant for the door sensors.

I knew that should the ladybird stay on that train, it would have never survived, so my brain was searching for a solution of how to get that thing off the train.

We were approaching Eindhoven and I only had 15 minutes left on the train, so I had to think fast. I was reviewing all objects in my backpack which could have been suitable for organizing an escape of the ladybird beetle from the train. And then suddenly the solution was clear. In front of me on the table was standing my paper coffee cup. I bought a cup of coffee on the train station in Venlo. I drank the coffee and now the cup was empty… An easiest thing would have been to get the ladybird into a coffee cup. Yet, I didn’t want the ladybird to die in the rest of the coffee drops. I am not a specialist in ladybirds after all and  I wasn’t sure if coffee could be harmful for it. So I opened the coffee cup, took some paper tissues from my backpack and placed them inside of the coffee cup. Then I got up a bit from my seat and tried to put the ladybird inside of my coffee cup. It took me about a minute to get the beetle inside of the cup. The people who were sitting around me were watching me speechless. Finally, I got the ladybird inside of my cup and closed the lid…

When I got out in Eindhoven, the first thing I did was that I opened the cup and let the ladybird to crawl out on the tree, which was growing near the train station…

Going to the workshop on integration in Tilburg I wanted to stretch a helping hand to a living creature who has been trapped in an unknown world. I wanted to help it to be free again and to have another chance to live…  

It did not matter to me what other people might think of me. I think it happens very often that we choose not doing something (even though we know that somebody might benefit from it) simply because we do not want our own group to think that we are not following conventions of our society... But if you think deeper, when we choose not to help somebody in the situation of frustration or despair because we so much depend on the opinions of the members of our own group, it is actually us who are trapped behind the glass. Trapped inside of our own framework of beliefs, thoughts, rules, etc. And this kind of prison is the hardest to escape from…

By giving each other chances to live, by giving each other chances to start something again we do not only set the other one free, but we also free ourselves.

Furthermore, the help which we provide  has to be adequate for a particular situation and circumstances: “paper inside of the coffee cup” is a small gesture that can save a life… and maybe more…

Feeling of becoming an amalgamation of experiences…

During my travelling in the last couple of weeks I collected some stories and observations
about our changing world, which I would like to share with you in the form of
thoughts /insights.

·         An Afghan taxi driver in Wolfsburg, who was listening to Persian music and speaking Russian to me. Fantastic!

·         A taxi driver who was born in the former Eastern Germany sharing with me his travelling plans and telling me that every day he celebrates his freedom to travel anywhere he wants. The Wall does not exist anymore… Yet, we still have to do a lot to erase it from the minds of people and for sure not to build any new barriers in our physical and mental world.

·         Connecting to friends and family via Skype, e-mail, mobile no matter in what part of the world Life brings me. Having my dear people close and near to me. Even though some say it is an illusion and the distance does not become smaller, but if in our hearts we feel closely connected than we are already half way to each other.

·         Ability to buy similar things in many countries. I am not a big fan of it, but it surely gives you a feeling of familiarity. Another illusion? Or is it something that gives us a feeling of a commonly shared reality and hence makes us closer to each other, as we begin to define world through the same concepts?

·         Booking tickets and hotels for a short trip to see my friends in foreign country within half an hour, without leaving my home, online… Do you take it for granted? J Well, think that some 10-15 years ago we couldn’t do it…

·         Meeting my friends after not seeing them for 13 years and feeling so much at home with each other, as we have never parted… Was amazing!

·         Watching films with one my best friends online, living in two different countries. It is nice! Even if it is an illusion of being close, but after all we did spent quality time together and this is what counts!

·         Filling my MP3 player with music in English, French, Danish, Greek, Spanish, Russian, German, Ukrainian, Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Polish and Armenian… There is still room for expansion! J

·         Working in a virtual team and having a feeling that my colleagues are near.

·         Reading books written by authors from different corners of this world. This is so great. I wish I could read them all in originals. Languages certainly open doors to understanding cultural backgrounds…

·         Realizing that I have education from three different countries. Yes, for that I had to go on holidays J

·         Celebrating holidays which are not part of my ethnic history and enjoying them.

·         Realizing for an uncountable time over and over again that there is much more that connects us all, no matter of our origins, affiliations, etc. rather than separates us.

·         Feeling at home everywhere I go.

·         Sharing stories with a person who comes from a different country than me about Central Asia and knowing exactly what we are talking about!

·         Realizing that no matter how great the modern technology is, which enables us to communicate through the distance, there is nothing better than sitting across the table with another human being, drinking wine, sharing stories, laughing together, looking in the eyes, feeling the warmth of hands… Magic…

·         Feeling that I am becoming an amalgamation of my (international and intercultural) experiences… and feeling so good about it…

Yet another bus story...

I suppose public transportation can really be a source of enlightenment... Who knows?

Imagine a situation... Rush hours in the evening... A bus is full of people... On one of the stops two charming elderly ladies in their late 80s enter the bus. Some people get up to give them their seats. They are coming back from a dinner and actively discussing  nice time they spent together with other ladies...

I look at them with admiration, because not in many countries elderly people can enjoy such an active and fulfilling life like here in Europe... They caught my attention and I contuniue musing about them, imagining how they looked like when they were the same age as I am now and how will I look when I get in my 80s...

The attention of the ladies however, caught two Asian girls (most likely exchange students at the local University), who were sitting across the aisle... And the following dialogue in German takes place:

Lady A: I think It's so difficult to read Asian faces, you never know if they are happy or not.
Lady B: Yes, I do agree with you and it is also very difficult to tell how old they are...

All this is being said relatively loud, for naturally my dear ladies cannot hear that well and it is loud on the bus. The Asian girls hear the whole conversation and start giggling in their own language, for they understand everything which was said. I can see  from their reaction that they are totally amused... I smile too and contunue to muse... My thoughts, this time make me travel in time to a similar situation on the train in Scandinavia. I was reading a book written in Cyrillic alphabet. In front of me there were two women in their 40s and we were facing each other, so they could see my book:

Conversation in Danish:
Lady A to Lady B: What kind of language is this?!
Lady B: I have no idea...
Me (smilingto both of them) and replying in Danish: "It's Russian"...

...It brings me yet to another train situation in Italy, when one of my closest friends and I  were travelling from Assisi back to Rome one October evening. Since we do not share the same linguistic background we spoke English. We got seats by the table where 4 people can be seated facing each other. In front of us was a group of loud youngsters who were making fun of us. I understood that something was going on, yet since I do not speak Italian I couldn't know all the details. I asked my friend, who spoke absolutely impecable Italian for he studied in worked in Rome for some years back then and he promised to tell me all about it once we got off the train. All he could wisper to me was that the youth were thinking that we are Albanians and somehow this was an amusing fact for them and they were discussing us...

The train was totally full, there was no single free place. On one of the station just after Assisi an elderly lady came in and my friend, being a true gentleman, got up and gave her his seat. The lady started to thank him heartedly in Italian. After she finished prasing him, he said one short sentence in Italian without a slightest foreign accent: "Where I was raised, it is very normal to give a seat to a lady"... It suddenly became very silent across the table and the youngsters haven't pronounced a single word all the way to Rome...

Curtain down...

...Oh! Assumptions, Assumptions! What do you do to us?! How many evil jokes you play on us humans?! How many times you lead us astray and let us live an illusion?..

Soulmates

One summer or early autumn day I was on the bus... In the crowd my sight caught a skinny girl who was sitting next to where I was standing. At first she seemed to be just like any other teenage girls, who like to experiment with their appearance in search for their identity. The girl had some tattoos done on her arms. But it were not the tattoos, that drew my attention to the girls’ arm, it was the message that tattoos communicated...


On her outer arm with big black velvet letters was written: “Soulmate, dry your eyes”, on the inner side of her arm the same script stated: “Soulmates never die”.


It has been some years now, since I went off that bus, but the message is still engraved in my mind... I wish I'd knew what experience made this girl put these sentenses on her arm. Who is her soulmate? Does everybody have one? And if yes, what is my soulmate doing at the moment? Are his eyes also wet?..


I guess the fact that we cannot share our expiences totally and completely with another person makes us loan even more for understanding.... an effortless understanding... An understanding that a soul which feels in a similar ways to ours can give us... We loan for situations when we might say nothing, yet we know that a human next to us shares a large amount of our perceptions, view points, visions, ideas, etc. Maybe not entirely and maybe not exactly, but in that moment we feel that our worlds are penetrating each other and there is a common ground... A beautiful experience? Indeed.


Like many goods things in this life understanding is a both way street... The opposite of being understood is of course to understand... A true, sincere understanding, or at least an attempt of such, it is probably one of the biggest gifts we can give to another human being... The beauty of this experience is that we can always give this present in many variations... We can confirm somebody's words verbally... We can show it with our actions... We can experess it in thousand of non-verbal ways. No matter how we do it, the most important thing is we give it sincerely... From soul to soul...


"My soulmate, today, apart from my smile, a sunray and a song of a bird, I give you my understanding... Dry your eyes...wherever you are!"

The Reason for Living? Why?

Why the Reason for Living, you would ask. Well, I'd say it's a modest attempt to share with you my celebration of Life... In all its beauty and hardships and in all its variations...

The appreciation of Life comes to me in the most unexpected moments. Seeing an alley colored by fall in shades of yellow, green and red, a quiet dusky morning when I can still see a piece of mysterious moon looking through my kitchen window, people laughing, a feeling of “togetherness” which you can experience of being close to somebody who shares your world view, just a normal rainy day and then a sudden rainbow in the sky, wind playing with my hair, the magic of human voices... The list can just go on... Such things set my soul on fire. Fire and desire to go on, to share, to give, to live…

It always depends on how you percieve things you would say, right? I do not believe in born optimists, neither do I believe in born pessimists. Sometimes we say the glass is half full, other times we believe it is half empty.. It all depends on our current life circomstances...Life  is a flow and a constant change and nothing stays the same. Our views, feelings and perceptions are always evolving, while the experiences of our pasts loose their sharpness, intensity and become covered with archeological dust of memories.

No matter what happened in the past trusting the process of Life is one of the most important mechanisms of enjoying the present moment and gazing into the future with an inner smile.  Every experience is just a tiny piece in a vast puzzle of Life. All paintings contain shadows of light and dark colors. Similarly Life has to offer everything ranging from ecstatic happiness till sadness that makes your heart cry with tears. Both extremes exist and constitute our puzzle. If you take one tiny piece of puzzle, be it dark or light, it is insignificant and in a way useless. It is only in the connection with other pieces it gains its meaning, for it is only then we can see the whole picture. And maybe, by looking at it times and over again we will start discovering our Reason for Living.